Face alignment with unified subspace optimization of active statistical models

Abstract

Active statistical models including active shape models and active appearance models are very powerful for face alignment. They are composed of two parts: The subspace model(s) and the search process. While these two parts are closely correlated, existing efforts treated them separately and had not considered how to optimize them overall. Another problem with the subspace model(s) is that the two kinds of parameters of subspaces (the number of components and the constraints on the components) are also treated separately. So they are not jointly optimized. To tackle these two problems, an unified subspace optimization method is proposed. This method is composed of two unification aspects: (1) unification of the statistical model and the search process: The subspace models are optimized according to the search procedure; (2) unification of the number of components and the constraints: The two kinds of parameters are modelled in an unified way, such that they can be optimized jointly. Experimental results demonstrate that our method can effectively find the optimal subspace model and significantly improve the performance. © 2006 IEEE.